Steven Longstreet stood in the cold darkness, his back to the river. He reached into his coat pocket, and felt the reassuring weight of his pistol. That gave him some comfort, for a moment, anyway.
Wrong pocket.
He reached into his other pocket, and found what he really was looking for, and he pulled his flask out and took a deep drink. The liquor burned on the way down, he didn't notice it.
He was pretty sure that this was his last night on earth, and it was pretty clear that he wasn't going to be dying quietly in his sleep.
I'll be God-damned if I'm going to die sober, he thought to himself.
He wasn't sure when Red Eyes would come to cull him. But he knew that the time had run out. The Detective had only given Steven forty-eight hours to live unless Steven gave him the information about how the Spider could be found. Steven hadn't.
Steven looked at his watch for the millionth time. The forty-eight hours was definitely up. It was time for him to die.
He turned and watched the river for a moment, looked at the lights from the buildings glistening on the water. It was beautiful. It always had been. And long after the fights, and the struggles, and the love and the evil all played themselves out, the river would still be running to the ocean. Same as it always had, same as it always would, rolling past all of it.
Steven heard the crunch of a boot on gravel behind him.
He turned around.
"Hello, Detective," he said. "You're looking...
different."
"Yes," the Detective said, stepping into the light.
The Detective had changed in the short time since Steven had seen him last. The Detective looked...
longer,
stretched out in some way. He was taller than he had seemed at the bar, now looking about seven feet tall. Maybe more. His arms hung well past the sleeves of his slate gray sports coat, the fingers distended, the hands grotesquely long and distorted. His head bobbed on his elongated neck, almost as if it was too heavy for the long and slender neck to support.
The Detective's eyes... that was the more disturbing part. Steven looked into them briefly, shuddered, looked away. If the person standing in front of Steven was still human, or ever had been, the eyes gave no indication of that. All black, no pupil, no iris. Just solid black orbs revealing nothing in hollowed out sockets.
"You are probably referring to my appearance," the Detective went on. "I'm in a bit of a situation...
between
things, you might say. I probably won't explain it in too much detail, but I'm neither... here nor there, I suppose."
"OK."
"That's not very important, though. I am here to kill you, I imagine. I don't think you are going to tell me what I need to know, are you? Where I can find the Spider?"
"No."
The Detective shrugged, and dropped to one knee.
"That's what I expected," he said, and began dragging one of his long, slender fingers into the pavement at his feet. As he did so, red light began to burst from the ground as the Detective traced a circular shape.
"I don't need to tell you that it's useless to run, do I, Steven?"
Steven sighed, and reached into his pocket.
"No," he said. "I know there's no point to running, but I still might anyway."
The Detective's head snapped up to look at Steven. Something that might once have been a smile broke across the Detective's face.
"That's up to you. It doesn't make any difference. It'll find you, it'll kill you, it'll drain you and it'll eat your very soul. That's what it does. That's all it does."
The Detective stood back from the glowing circle, and Steven watched steam rise from it. He heard a snap, heard a growl, low, inhuman.
Steven took a step backwards, involuntarily, then another. He could feel the river lapping up against his shoes by the time he stopped himself.
The smell.
He watched as a clawed hand reached its way out of the hole, then another, and he watched as slowly, the killing machine that was Red Eyes crawled out of it.
The Detective stepped back into shadows.
Red Eyes crawled out of the hole, slowly, in no hurry. It tasted the air with its tongue, it flicked its long tail, about as it took in its surroundings, taking it in, the barbed hook as the end of the tail stabbing as the very night itself.
Steven took one last drink, and threw his flask into the river. He reached into his pocket again, and pulled out his pistol. He pointed it with unsteady hands at the creature.
Red Eyes turned its monstrous head to face Steven, its lips curled open, revealing razor sharp fangs, dripping. The tail slowly came to rise above the creature's head, the barb pointing directly at Steven.
"Fuck," Steven said, and fired his pistol, once, twice, a third time.
Nothing. The creature flicked its tail back and forth, as if annoyed. If any of the bullets had hit Red Eyes, there was no way to tell.
Steven forced himself to put his gun back in his pocket. He needed to save a bullet for himself.
"You died for nothing, Steven," the Detective's voice carried in the wind. "I'll still find her. I'll find her, and when I do, I'll have more power than anything you can imagine."
Red Eyes stepped closer, the barbed tail bobbing, lashing, venom dripping from the end of it.
Steven stepped into the river, up to his knees now. The cold black water swirled around him. He wished it would carry him away.
The night sky split with a deafening sound, Steven put his hands over his ears at the pain. Red Eyes shrieked at the intrusion, spreading its wings.
The Power landed into the river with a splash, she rose from her knee and regarded the creature, her cape fluttering in the wind.
"There you are," she whispered. "Finally."
Red Eyes shrieked again, and raised to its full height.
